


Hunger

by Sea-Glass (PJ_Marvell)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Statement, no betas we die like archival assistants, rated for language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-11 02:12:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16466732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PJ_Marvell/pseuds/Sea-Glass
Summary: Statement of Kabir Ali, regarding strange properties of a set of paintings delivered to his place of work.  Original statement given 21 February 2014.





	Hunger

**Author's Note:**

> Please see notes at the end for further content warnings.

_ Statement of Kabir Ali, regarding strange properties of a set of paintings delivered to his place of work. Original statement given 21 February 2014. _

_ Statement begins. _

I’m here because I know what happened to Charlie Bramble. He was murdered at the Ardea restaurant, in the Heron Tower on Bishopsgate, on 23 November 2013. During the dinner service, actually.

~~I haven’t gone to the police because~~ Obviously, if I’m here, that means I haven’t gone to the police. If this was something the feds could deal with I’d have gone to them straight away. Instead I’ve got you, and whatever good your research will get me. Suppose it doesn’t matter. At least  _ someone _ will know what happened to Charlie. He deserves that, at least.

It started when the Jansons got delivered. You know, I was actually excited? I’ve loved Juris Janson ever since I first came across him. It was my A-Levels, I think. It was the first non-classical art that ever moved me, and I loved the way the colours bled together to create what felt, to me anyway, like emotion in its purest form. I could never do that, no matter how hard I tried. Did projects on Janson at school and later at college, but I could never get the trick of it. No, I found out that where my art lay was sculpture, and though I got a good few essays out of him, I never managed to recreate that feeling that Janson gave me.

In hindsight, that’s probably for the best.

Anyway, I hope that explains that when the owner of Ardea told me he’d commissioned a set of Jansons to hang in the restaurant, I about lost my mind with excitement.

Also, if you’re thinking it, yes, ha ha, the artist had to abandon his studio and get a real job waiting tables. But Ardea is Michelin-starred and has a rep for being second to none, which means they pay above the level to keep well-trained staff and that most people there are a bit more moneyed than your average punter. You can say what you want about rich people, but oil their egos enough and they tip like drunken sailors. I earned enough to keep me in studio rent money and clay, thanks.

So, the Jansons. The owner - I’m not going to say his name, because he’s a litigious bastard - told me about them about two weeks before they were due to arrive. Apparently they’d already been delayed a couple of months - some sort of problems with the couriers, but apparently he’d found a local outfit to deal with it and they were finally on their way. Anyway, the paintings and their delivery only came up when he asked me to rearrange my shifts. We were going to close for a couple of midweek days, and re-open on a weekend service so the Jansons would be seen by a full house. He asked me to come in on a Friday to help hang them. I pretended like I wasn’t bothered, that I had nothing better to be doing, but in truth I desperately wanted to be the first to touch them, to stand before them and drink in whatever sensation came rolling off them like waves on a dark ocean.

The upshot was that I waited with ill-concealed excitement for two weeks, until I came in one grey November morning on what was meant to be a day off, and stood in near-holy rapture in front of a series of crates containing original, never-yet-seen Jansons.

It was the closest thing I’ve ever come to a spiritual experience, and obviously Charlie completed ruined it, the little prick.

Look, I never liked Charlie. I’ll admit it. He was a tosser - posh kid with a useless degree working a job he was barely competent at because mummy and daddy hadn’t found one they could buy his way into yet. To be honest, he might have one day been a decent bloke - he had the occasional flash of pleasantness - but at that point he was just insufferable. Still not right, what happened next.

So, as I was saying, I’m standing there transfixed by these paintings, when in walks Charlie like “well, that’s creepy as, bro.” He used to call me bro. Thought it made him sound street. I hated it. He walked past me, looking closer, and let out this nervous little laugh.

“Seriously, that’s some messed up shit,” he said, leaning towards the nearest canvas.

There were six enormous canvases, titled  _ Red and Maroon I, II  _ and  _ III, Grey, Maroon and Black I  _ and  _ II _ , and  _ Ghrelin _ . That was the first weird thing -  _ Ghrelin _ . Jurik Janson doesn’t name is paintings with concepts. He describes them, usually with the colours or where he was when he painted them. It’s the job of the viewer, he’s said, to paint concepts onto abstract colours. So while five of them had standard names,  _ Ghrelin _ was an outlier. I’d read the paperwork when they’d arrived, so I was itching to know what was special about this painting that it deserved an actual name. It was that canvas I was standing in front of when Charlie made his less-than-erudite comment.

Annoying as he was, he wasn’t exactly wrong.

The whole series was painted in shades of red and maroon, dark, glistening. They were, like a lot of Janson’s recent work, largely made of irregular shapes, imposed on each other and the background, picked apart by different shades and textures. These were mostly squares and oblongs - in one, two pale grey rectangles rose from a maroon background, their edges bleeding out into the dark red. It seemed to move as you stared at it, the red encroaching on the grey. Another was a red rectangle painted on a burgundy background, only visible when the light caught it, seeming to shine like it was still wet and dripping. 

There was nothing particularly exceptional about the techniques used on the canvases - I mean, Janson keeps most of his methods secret from even his own assistants, but from what I could see, there were the bleeds, textures and layers of paint that gave Janson his distinctive style. But I’d never seen anything in his oeuvre quite as... _ organic _ as this series. On the surface the canvases fit in entirely with the rest of his work. But standing in front of them for any length of time, you started to see things. The glisten of blood here, the shape of an off-white vertebra there. We all went quiet, me, Charlie and the boss, staring at these things. For a moment, as the silence settled, all I could think was  _ meat _ .

Charlie’s stomach rumbled suddenly, snapping us all out of it. I think we even laughed. We shook it off, the boss sending Charlie for coffees and pastries, and then we hung the pictures. They were...well, they were magnificent. Even with the daylight streaming in, the restaurant was hemmed in, somehow. The walls drew all your focus, kept your eyes on their visceral forms. It was amazing - I think these were the most powerful Jansons I’d ever seen, and here they were, hanging in the restaurant. I couldn’t wait for our re-opening that Saturday - I knew the paintings would look even better in the low light. That’s what they’d been painted for, after all. Their true form, if you will.

There was nothing else to do after that - we cleaned up the packaging and left. It was a perfectly normal evening. Except maybe for the fact that I remember eating an entire pizza to myself. I put it down to physical exertion, drank a beer and went to bed.

I was actually excited to get to work that weekend. Cleared up early at the studio Saturday morning, got myself ready for the dinner service, arrived at work fifteen minutes early for my shift - only to find that... _ moron _ who owned the place had the lights turned up as high as they would go. I could almost have yelled - the explicit point of these pieces was to be seen on low light, in the usual ambience of Ardea. Instead they were practically drowning in light, just because our prat of an owner wanted everyone in London to know he had Jansons hanging in his restaurant. Tit. 

It soured my mood for the whole week, because he kept the lights high, showing off his great taste and even greater personal fortune. To be honest, I didn’t have much time to be angry that week, although it kept flashing up every now and then. I don’t know if word of Jansons got around, or if we were mentioned in some lifestyle mag or something somewhere, but the restaurant was the busiest I’ve ever seen it. Every table was full and ordering three courses - all the most expensive dishes, everything rich and filling. I think it was the most tiring week I’d spent at the restaurant - I was flopping into bed each night, exhaustion only rivalled by the rumbling of my stomach. I remember being constantly starving, no matter what I’d eaten. I was downing all the carbs I could get my hands on after work, and somehow it was never enough. At the time I put it down to overwork, but I didn’t think anything ~~spooky~~ ~~cursed~~ weird was happening.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There was one moment where even through my exhaustion I think I realised something was wrong. It was Wednesday that week, I think - the twenty-first - I’d been caught up in the kitchen, helping one of the sous-chefs with something, so by the time I got off shift, the main restaurant floor was closing up and the lights were low. I walked out towards the doors, too tired even to think about the paintings, but when I glanced over my shoulder at the floor, I saw a figure standing in front of one of them. I called out to whoever it was, asking if they were all right as they hadn’t moved for a while. I didn’t get a response, so I walked over slowly. It was the owner, standing there, transfixed by the painting and chewing...something. I couldn’t see what it was, so I backed away to the door and flipped the lights up. Two things became clear then - he’d been chewing on a near-frozen leg of lamb, and he looked as shocked as I did about that.

We didn’t really talk much - I think I asked him if he was okay, and he sort of stuttered an answer, before saying he’d been overdoing it, and maybe he should go home to bed. I let him leave, completely freaked out by the whole thing. Although, I remember as I turned the lights back on and made for the door, my mouth was watering.

I didn’t think about it - about any of it - until the dinner service on Friday. The lights were a little lower, finally, and the colours and textures of the Jansons were finally being seen as they were meant to. There was a mix of dread and excitement in my gut as I sat the first table that day. For the first time since we’d unpacked them, that impression of organic forms, of meat, sinew, blood and bone came flooding back. I wanted to stand in front of them and just watch as in the dark light, the outlines shifted and bled. I wanted to really  _ listen _ to what it had to tell me. I promised myself I’d finally have that chance at the end of the night, and turned back to work for the rest of the evening.

Easier said than done - I was fuzzy, headachy, like all my thoughts were tuned slightly off-station and full of static. No one else seemed to notice or be affected, so I carried on. And I think I’d have made it, if it hadn’t been for that birthday group.

There were about fifteen of them and they’d started off loud and were well on their way to raucous by the time it happened. I can’t remember anything remarkable about them - they were probably somewhere in their thirties, dressed like they’d come straight from work. The birthday girl had a sash on announcing her as such. They’d obviously been pre-gaming, but they didn’t look like trouble, just hassle. The sort of thing I'd seen a hundred times before on a Friday night. But I felt something was off as soon as I appeared to take their first orders. I’d handed out at least three vegan menus, but every order I wrote on my pad had meat in it somewhere. They called us back for extra appetisers, entrees, sides, drinks, and they ate, and ate, and ate. And then, when I was leaning against one of the server stations, the lights in the restaurant dimmed, and out of the kitchen came Charlie Bramble with a birthday cake, the candles the brightest thing in the room.

I couldn’t move - I felt my thoughts push further away, felt them become things that weren’t  _ mine _ . I tried to run for the door, but my knees were locked. I couldn’t look away - all around the walls pressed in, shades of red and maroon and blood and bone, the sheer feeling of it bleeding into everything else, colouring it dark and pulsing and wet. Everything was meat and all I could do was  _ hunger _ . Hunger, and watch.

There was one moment of stillness, just after the birthday girl blew out the candles. For a moment, the afterimage flickered in the dark room, as it seemed everyone held their breaths. And then they were on Charlie. They pulled him down onto the table and tore into him, ripping past the cloth of his uniform and down into the skin and flesh below. Some used their teeth, some their fingers, but all of them came away bloodied and chewing, their eyes rolling in some awful parody of ecstasy. They were all over him, ripping as his face, his chest, the meat of his calves, eating and eating as though this was the last meal between them and starvation, and they  _ wouldn’t stop _ .

Charlie screamed, of course, but not for nearly as long as you’d think.

By the time I came back to myself, they’d eaten every scrap of him. All the meat, every bone, even his bloodied clothing and the now-crimson tablecloth. I swear I saw one of them lick something off the wood of the table. Meanwhile everyone around them just carried on as though Charlie had never been there at all. A new tablecloth was brought, a new round of drinks, and they started talking about settling the bill.

I quit there and then. Got my coat, scribbled my notice on a napkin and never went back. I’ve not waited another table since. I’ve not painted either. I won’t touch the stuff - clay feels safer, and I’ve never been overcome with the urge to eat it. Meat’s out, too - I’m veggie, and considering going completely vegan, just to be safe. I work in a bookshop now - feels safer than paintings. Although knowing my luck I’ll find some fucking book that makes me want to wear other people like bodysuits, or something.

The worst thing - apart from the fact of Charlie dying like that - the worst thing is the nightmares. Obviously I have them, I’d be worried if I didn’t. But in the nightmares, I’m not watching. In the nightmares, it’s my hands ripping lumps off Charlie’s thigh, listening to him shriek. I can taste them, in the dreams - hot and salty and the most amazing, delicious thing I’ve ever tasted. See, the thing is that I didn’t stay at the server’s table the whole time. I was there when they blew the candles out, and once I came back to myself I went back straightaway to see them licking the last drops of blood off their fingers. But when the fog finally cleared, I was shut in one of the walk-in fridges, huddled in one corner, chewing. It was a lump of meat, raw and bloody, and I swallowed it without thinking. I’ve always hoped it was pork.

_ Statement Ends. _

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings for cannibalism, canon-typical violence.
> 
> This fic brought to you by the time I took a date to the Tate Modern and we ended up sitting in front of Mark Rothko's _Black on Maroon_ discussing murder.


End file.
